Editing My Little Mahou Shoujo:Astra Knightley (section)

==Background==
Astra used to know a few things about the world, most of them from her astrophysicist mother and astronomer father; that you can't get energy from nothing, that the earth orbits the sun, that magic was ancient superstition, and that trying to make friends with the petty bullies and anti-intellectuals at school was a waste of time.

Then Celestia called her, and introduced her to the dragon. 

She doesn't know what else to call it (his species; Astra is perfectly aware that it goes by 'Spike,' thank you); it's a bipedal, saurian or reptilian sapient creature that can exhale green flames. Somehow, these flames can teleport small objects, particularly paper. It doesn't make a lick of sense according to everything she's learned and independently confirmed about the laws of physics. And he's so... matter of fact about it, too. It annoys her.

Oh, and they met because a talking cat (with cat-sized and shaped vocal cords, mind) with a sun on it's forehead (too regular to be a dye-job) named Celestia (she's very polite) who charged her and a bunch of mostly-strangers with the defense of the world from the forces of Nightmare Moon (and she's Dumbledore levels of cryptic about it). Also, she gave her a crown that lets her transform into the Avatar of Friendship. Complete with magical powers, and a magical girl dress out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere, in apparent violation of conservation of energy.

Well. Okay then! Clearly the abilities that we'll call, for the moment, 'magic' are special exceptions to the laws of physics that she can evoke with very specific triggers. It's not like the laws of Newtonian mechanics were revoked by relativity, or that quantum mechanics makes relativity any less useful as a model of reality. Actually, the effects might have to do with quantum mechanical virtual particles; that's a useful line of inquiry...

Astra is in the awkward position of her magical girl abilities, well, empirically existing. More to that, there seems to be a causal relationship between genuine positive emotional connections ('Friendship') and the amount of power she can draw on; she's quite literally a force multiplier, somehow resonating between her and those she can truly call friend. Clearly more research is needed.

She's paying a lot more attention in humanities classes now, in case the 'soft' sciences might be helpful for the whole avatar of friendship thing. It also helps that she had a regular gaming group with a bunch of similarly intellectual outcasts, thanks to her brother's circle of nerds; she still doesn't understand why anyone gives Laura and Bonnie crap for being open about their romance, or how anyone with the sentience of spagnum moss can think that Ashliegh is anything short of a genius. A clumsy, cross-eyed genius, sure, but Astra has yet to win a chess match against her and her Starcraft win/loss ratio isn't looking much better. 

Astra's powers are basically channeling Forces/Prime/Space abilities, and tend to have an astronomical theme; because she isn't without a sense of irony, Astra's incantations are in Latin. She cheats, though; her summoning circles are computer generated, and her grimoire is a modified iPhone. Computational sorcery is much easier than doing the math in her head, after all.